This period saw an intensive effort to expand the troupe's dance repertoire and improve its corps de ballet. Previously ballets had figured solely as divertissements between opera acts. Although this continued, Nicholas [Sheremetev], as part of his effort to mimic as accurately as possible the practices of the Parisian theater, pushed the creation of full balletic works. Nicholas knew ballet, having danced as a child at court and being acquainted with the work of the great choreographic innovator Jean-Georges Noverre. In 1786, Charles Le Picq, a student of Noverre, arrived in Russia, and Nicholas sent Tatiana Shlykova and Yelena Kazakova to St. Petersburg to study under him. Two years later he hired the respected Italian Giuseppe Salomoni, another follower of Noverre, as his troupe's ballet master.
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By 1790, Nicholas's ballet was among the finest in Russia. His dancers introduced the latest balletic works from France and surpassed in this genre the ballets of both the court in St. Petersburg and Moscow's Petrovsky Theater. Such supremacy would continue throughout the next decade, during which Nicholas's corps de ballet would play a central role in bringing to Russia the latest developments in choreography and particularly the new school of Noverre, staging pathbreaking pieces such as his tragic ballet d'action Medea ten years before the Petrovsky Theater, and encouraging Diderot's notions of dance as an independent art form.
The Pearl: A true Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia by Douglas Smith. 2008. Page 68-9.
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